


go lost (fall to what might be)

by ceresilupin



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Depression, Dragon Age Kink Meme, F/M, Lyrium Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:29:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2861393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceresilupin/pseuds/ceresilupin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Inquisitor, post-Haven, dealing with some of the changes in her life and making some decisions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	go lost (fall to what might be)

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for undiagnosed depression and Cullen's withdrawal symptoms.
> 
> Fill is for this prompt: Murdered Couple on the Ridge in Emprise du Lion -- I want some sort of reaction to that, because it broke my heart. And nooooobody seemed to care. So. Something. Does it make Quizzy realize they've been keeping their LI at an arms length, because the time is never right or what if something terrible happens to them? The timing is never perfect and the world is a dangerous place, but before they died, that couple knew that they had each other. I'll take any reaction from anyone. Or multifills (said Anon, even though they'd never had someone fill one of their multitude of prompts with a single fill). (http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/11864.html?thread=46809944)
> 
> Title is from Basia Bulat's 'Sparrow'. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4yp2OhtIs4)

The thought comes slowly, in fits and stars, but unavoidably: she’s not all right.

She hasn’t been for a while. Not since she was part of a mercenary company selected to provide some non-magic backup for the mage delegation to the Conclave. Then, she was just a mousey tinkerer-archer, with no real aspirations other than never owing her noble family a single bent copper. But once she was named the fabled Herald of Andraste. . . .

It’s not the title, it’s everything that’s come with it. Encountering her relatives again, after she had run so long and hard from them. Finding herself trapped in a horrible future, her friends tortured, the world collapsing, because of her failures. . . . Haven destroyed around her, Adan burning to death as the Iron Bull hauled her away from the flames, the air full of screams – walking through the snow for hours and hours, seeing her own skin turn black and hard—

_Yeah, you’re not all right,_ a voice like Bull’s says in her head. _Won’t be for a while, Boss._

Gloom settles over her heart, as night settles over the mountains. For a little while, the setting sun still reflects off the snow, providing purplish illumination. The edges of the sky are faintly light, as if it’s a bowl fitted imperfectly over an uneven surface. But no moon is coming, and there are clouds enough to block a million stars.

Evelyn shakes off her daze as they approach the entrance to Skyhold. It is hushed and quiet, the soldiers driven to their tents by the dark and the lightly falling snow. Usually the path from the valley to the bridge is a muddy, icy mess, but now it’s a smooth blanket of white, the individual flakes glittering in the torchlight. When she looks back, Solas is reading by the blue flame in his hand, oblivious to the world. Blackwall is lost in thought, gazing out over the mountains, a torch in his good hand. His other – his shield arm – is bandaged snug to his side. Cole, also carrying a light, is staring down at the back of his mount’s neck, his hat shielding his face. Behind him, the soldiers who accompanied them from Emprise du Lion travel in a ragged line.

She wonders, briefly, whether it was coincidence or conspiracy that left her alone without a torch. Of course, she’s injured, but who among them isn’t? She feels like a shadowy and invisible figure, leading the souls of those claimed by the battlefield.

Sounds from ahead catch her attention. She turns as the gate is drawn up and is the first one through. At the entrance to Skyhold proper, she can see a small group waiting for them. Their postures are hunched against the cold, clustered around the light; something about their movements suggests they are passing the time with idle chit-chat.

The leader turns, and even without the torches she would have recognized him, by the outline of his armor, or the shape of his cowl. Or perhaps it was simply how those shapes, picked out against shadowed stone, are enough to make her feel.

~

She dismounts carefully, her battered legs gone rubbery after so long riding. The men who’d been tied to their saddles were carried off by their brother soldiers. Further in the courtyard, Evelyn can see Mother Giselle and her healers awaiting them by a large bonfire.

The world is still quiet and crackling. The voices of the healers and soldiers are echoing and urgent, but distant. Cullen, as he helps her stand, is hushed. “Are you all right, Inquisitor?”

Before she can answer – which is just as well, as she still feels lost and drifting inside of her head – Solas interrupts. “She needs to rest, Commander,” he says simply. His feet are half-bare against the snow as he comes to stand at her side, hands clasped behind his back. “The majority of her injuries are healed, but broken bones take time to mend.”

Evelyn waves him aside. He’d threatened to talk to her advisors if she wasn’t sensible – evidently he’d decided against even giving her a chance to push herself, and moved on to simply assuming she would. She wishes he hadn’t. She doesn’t like the thought of resting. It’s too tempting to stop and never start again.

“Broken bones?” Cullen had stepped away as Solas approached, but now he moves forward again. “What happened?”

Evelyn smirks wearily at Solas, tossing the ball back to him since he was so eager to sell her out in the first place. He cocks an eyebrow, and then inclines his head. “She fell off a cliff, Commander.”

“She fell off a – you fell off a _cliff?_ ” Cullen rubs his face. Solas, his work done, grants Evelyn one last amused nod and wanders off. “How in the Maker’s name did you manage that? You weren’t chasing after those shards again, where you?” He looks thunderous at the mere idea of the things. “I don’t trust them. Or those skulls.”

Evelyn sighs. “It was during a fight with Red Templars,” she says hoarsely. Cullen has to lean forward to hear her. Evelyn pats her mount’s side – if not for Anomen, here, she would have collapsed already. “I zigged when I should have zagged, and went right over the side. Boom.”

Cullen winces in sympathy. “How far down?”

Evelyn shrugs, and then regrets it, clapping her hand to the back of her neck as it twinges. “Too far to remember,” she grits. “Took Cole four hours to find me. Apparently my ‘voice’ was getting quiet. But Solas is very good at healing injuries to the spine.”

Cullen’s face has gone ghostly, shocked and scared-looking in the softly-falling snow. “Andraste preserve me,” he murmurs, throat bobbing in a hard swallow. “Evelyn, you could have died, or been crippled. You have to . . . you have to be more careful.”

His voice is practically a plea, by the end. The only thing more terrifying than the thought of not having him is the thought of losing him. “I’m all right,” she says, not looking at him, trying not to feel warm and tender inside.

Cullen is no more easily fooled than her own heart. “You’re not all right,” he corrects gently. “Come along. Reports can wait – I’m taking you to your quarters, and you’re resting. Anyone who wants to talk to you will have to get through me.”

Cullen guides her away from Anomen. Evelyn pauses to check over the rest of her party – the soldiers have dismounted and turned their horses over to the stablehands, clustering around the healing tents to wait for news of their fellows. Solas is long gone. Blackwall is sitting on a log by the fire, submitting grumpily to an inspection of his injured arm.

Cole is still atop his horse, Casavir. A stablehand stands beside him, shaking his knee gently, nervously asking if ser is all right, if ser would like to look after his mount himself, if ser requires a healer, and so on. Cole didn’t seem to notice any of it.

Evelyn smiles a little, feeling like the gesture might crack her face. “Cole,” she calls.

The young man startles, his head flying up. He stares at her with his breathtaking eyes, and then dismounts easily and disappears towards the healing tents. Evelyn hopes no one is dying.

Cullen pats the stablehand’s shoulder as he departs with Casavir, scratching his head. When he looks back, inviting her to share in his amusement, Evelyn averts her eyes.

~

The next day, a servant hears her stirring and brings her breakfast. He throws open the drapes and tidies up the small mess of Evelyn’s clothes and bath, mentioning that Cullen asked for word when she woke. Once he’s finished tidying, Evelyn flees to her balcony. Someone has already swept the fresh snow away, and the sun is bouncing off the cut stone. She leans on the railing and takes the ring she found in Emprise du Lion from her pocket.

Deaf to the sound of the door to her quarters opening, she inspects the little trinket. The diamond is small, barely a speck. Aside from the ragged clothing on the bodies, that tiny diamond is the only clue to who the couple had been – and even then, all it tells them is that they were poor. Not much of a clue, really. Commoners die all the time, especially in Orlais, where the civil war and the great game claim so much more attention.

Cullen raps his knuckles on the door frame. “Inquisitor?”

Distracted, Evelyn hides the ring in her fist. “Yes?”

He steps onto the balcony, bracing himself as the wind gusts. Of course he wears no cloak – he insists he’s used to the cold, having grown up in Fereldan. He comes to stand beside her by the rail, left elbow almost touching her right. “Are you feeling better, my lady?”

“I’m fine,” she murmurs.

Cullen turns slightly to face her. He is clearly not convinced. For a moment, Evelyn returns his gaze. Barely a month ago, he had confessed that he was no longer taking lyrium – barely two weeks after that, she walked in on his conversation with Cassandra, and he murmured a perplexing _forgive me_ as he passed her for the exit. That night, she’d nearly leapt out of her skin as he destroyed his supply of lyrium against the door beside her head.

On their way to the Lion, Solas had given her some information about lyrium addiction and withdrawal – how the drug worked, what it felt like, and what it did. According to Solas, it could take months, maybe even longer, for the withdrawals to pass. They were expected to come in waves, mild at first, peaking, and then retreating until next time. Symptoms could include lightheadedness, body aches, migraines, nausea, mood swings, and occasionally hallucinations and delusional thinking – but it had been so long since anyone had tried to wean themselves from lyrium that it was difficult to say.

Hearing all that, in Solas’s crisp and clinical voice, was disturbing enough. Looking at Cullen now and picturing his suffering. . . . She’d vowed, as she led her party into the Lion, that she would root out the Red Templars for him. That she would find a way to show him how much she – what, exactly? How much she loved him? Surely it was too early to say something like that.

She wanted desperately to be valuable to him. To be valued by him.

There had been so much death there, in Emprise do Lion. Horrifying, to see what the Templars had done to their prisoners. Cole had been happy that they had helped free them, but Evelyn could only see that they would never be free at all. The shadows of what they endured would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

“I’m worried about you,” Cullen finally says, eyes flickering nervously. Evelyn glances away, steeling herself against the swell of hope and affection. “You seem listless. Not yourself.” Very carefully, he reaches out and touches her wrist. “What else happened? Besides your tumble off a cliff.”

It had been incredibly painful, but she still smiles a little. Such a graceless way for the mighty Herald and Inquisitor to injure herself.

“There was something,” Evelyn admits, voice cracking. She looks down at her hand and opens it, revealing the ring in her palm. Cullen removes his glove and cups his hand around hers, turning it gently as he inspects the trinket in the sunlight. Maybe Cullen was right about those Fereldan winters; surely it wasn’t just his gloves that kept his hand so much warmer than hers.

“I found it on a pair of bodies,” Evelyn admits. Cullen watches her. “I wanted – they looked like they died together. I wanted to learn their names, tell their families. Surely someone. . . .” She pauses, blinking. “But there wasn’t anything. Cole couldn’t hear anything other than fear and sadness. And Solas couldn’t find anything in the Fade.”

Cullen’s thumb stroked her palm lightly, careful not to knock the ring aside. “There’s magic on it,” he murmurs, surprising her.

“There is?”

“Only a small amount. A glamour.” His brow furrows as he focuses, and Evelyn realizes what he is going to do just before he does it – a small pulse of blue spills from their joined hands, and Cullen exhales heavily.

“There,” he says. He releases her to rub his forehead, leaning his weight heavily on the rail. “See what it revealed.”

Evelyn clenches her fingers into a fist around the ring. “I didn’t want – you didn’t have to hurt yourself,” she protests. _I don’t ever want you to hurt yourself._

Cullen lowers his hand from his forehead to his temple, brow still furrowed. “Did it reveal anything?” he asks, ignoring her complaint, staring pointedly into the middle distance. Irritated? Embarrassed? He braces himself on the railing and rolls his shoulders, shifting his jaw until Evelyn hears it pop.

Reluctantly, she looks down at the ring. Now there is an inscription on it, and an initial. Her eyes water a bit, reading it. When she does not speak, Cullen takes the ring to read it, lips moving silently. Finished, he returns it to her, pressing it into her palm with his thumb. Automatically, her fingers close, wrapping around his thumb, and his hand folds around hers.

His touch is even hotter than before, and trembling faintly. _It isn’t the Fereldan winters that keep him warm,_ Evelyn realizes. She adds ‘fever’ to the list of symptoms Solas provided.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to find who they are, Inquisitor,” Cullen says softly. “Too many people go missing and die in a warzone. But I’ll ask the mages, see if they’re missing anyone with those initials.” She looks up at him, and his hand tightens around hers. “It might help.”

She just – suddenly, she just wants to cry. Has, off and on, since the Conclave, but on days like this it’s stronger than ever. Is there any point to all of this? Her sister, exiled to the Circle when her abilities showed, had been named Symone – but she would only be eleven now, too young to have been either of those corpses. So there is no resolution, and she remains simply _gone_. . . . How many other missing mages were there? If they searched for ten thousand years, they could never find them all. They could never fix this.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” Cullen murmurs, touching her cheek and then letting his hand fall. “I wish I had – been more helpful.” He glances away, and she can see his face reddening.

Evelyn blinks rapidly. “Don’t apologize,” she orders, clutching at his other hand. “At least we have a lead.”

He shifts, his armor scraping the rail, so that his hand is on her shoulder. Her stomach fluttering, Evelyn watches him lean forward until their foreheads are touching. He strokes her cheek again, and then rests the very tips of his callused fingers against her throat. She swallows, and he inhales slowly.

“This means a lot to you,” he murmurs, squeezing her hand with the ring so she would know what he meant.

“I don’t know why,” she admits, still feeling fractured inside. Cole, whom she had expected to understand, had been confused by her reaction; they didn’t hurt anymore, he had pointed out. Why was she sad? “But everyone should be mourned by someone. Every death, every little pain.” Her hand finally leaves her side, drifting up to touch his chest like a weary bird finding a place to alight. She is thinking of his withdrawals.

“You do,” he said, “you are. More than anyone. That’s enough.” And then he kisses her forehead, pressing his lips to her skin for a long, long beat.

Evelyn squeezes her eyes shut, heart flinching from the sting of hope and the promise of pain. But when he bends his head and kisses her lips, she kisses him back, carefully and then with greater intent. Determined to be bold despite the risks.

And all along, that hard little nugget of someone else’s grief presses sharp lines into her palm. A reminder of what is to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the horses are named after previous Bioware/Obsidian LIs. I'm a geek.


End file.
